Sunday, November 18, 2012

The U.S. Has Reached a Tipping Point Toward the Good (Obama) (Huzzah)

You know that feeling before the news is in, that suspended state of false knowledge and ugly anticipation when the suspension fluid is fear, and it sinks into your pores, doesn't permeate, maybe, probably doesn't permeate but still, it reaches organs and blood cells, tumbles through your body until every inch of your personal geography has some reminder the worst could be on the way, and every shred of your variable consciousness negotiating good and bad alike, hope and fear, the known, unknown, and the imagined, informs your life that this--all this--could soon end? THAT feeling?

And the tension builds, internalizes and externalizes, sneaks in and out, up and down, sideways, elliptically, in a parabolic curve, and straight-ahead like a dive-bombing bee headed for that Looney Tunes buzzard or Bugs Bunny. And you who prides yourself on flexibility and imagination, on coping mechanism and device, cannot imagine yourself coping if the worst that could be materializes?

And so after months and weeks and days you go to bed not knowing, because if this is your last night of hope, you are going to let yourself have it.

So you wake, like it is the Day the Bomb is dropped in your lifetime.

And you are safe. Your loved ones are safe. Yes, safe is relative, but the great ignorance and hating both belonging to Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan have been vanquished. The world has changed, not like it did in 2008 when we elected a black president and the country showed it was trying to do the right thing. This time around, there the victory is more telling. This time around, the disaffection for poor people, basically for any but the wealthy, was exposed. And voted down by the majority of voters.

And every so often I feel the relief. I'll be walking down the street and my body will remember it can be happy. I realize yet again just how scared I was. A little more tension evaporates. And my joy is monumental. The U.S. has reached a tipping point toward the good.